Gay American Politician Visits Iran. Secret Agents Are on the Case.

Iran’s intelligence minister normally does not find himself on the receiving end of criticism by fellow hard-liners asking how he could possibly have overlooked a visit by a gay state legislator from the United States.

But that is what happened on Tuesday in Iran’s Parliament, where the minister, Mahmoud Alawi, faced tough questioning about a six-day visit this summer by Jim Dabakis, a state senator from Utah and the Democratic Party’s state chairman, who is gay. Mr. Alawi’s answer: His agents knew the visitor’s every move.

“The minister made it clear that the American politician was kept under surveillance by the intelligence forces during his stay in Iran,” the official Tasnim News Agency said in its report about Mr. Alawi’s parliamentary testimony. Tasnim made no reference in its report to Mr. Dabakis’s sexual orientation.

Tasnim said the minister had “assured the lawmakers that all schemes with the aim of making inroads into Iran are under control of the intelligence forces.”

Mr. Alawi’s disclosure was news to Mr. Dabakis, an art dealer in Salt Lake City who has advocated cultural exchanges between the United States and Iran to ease the countries’ decades-old estrangement. He also visited Iran in 2010.

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Jim Dabakis, a state senator from Utah, in 2014.CreditJim McAuley for The New York Times

“I’m just surprised that Iranian intelligence doesn’t have anything better to do,” Mr. Dabakis said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Dabakis and his partner received Iranian visas to travel as private individuals for the visit, which he said had been made at the invitation of a university group in Iran.

In a Sept. 16 interview with KUTV, a Salt Lake City television station, after the trip, Mr. Dabakis said they had been welcomed — the opposite of how Iran is often portrayed in much of the Western news media — and that Iranians wanted to mend relations with the United States.

“The people in Iran love Americans,” he told the television station. “We could not go down any city street without people following us, talking to us and inviting us to their home.”

Iranian state news media seized on the KUTV interview, portraying Mr. Dabakis as a subversive who had secretly traveled to Iran. Angry hard-line lawmakers there said they had not been told of the visit by Mr. Dabakis. Homosexuality is a serious criminal offense in Iran.

Mr. Dabakis said Tuesday that he had planned to travel to Iran again next year, but the uproar caused by his recent visit was giving him second thoughts.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable going unless I get a personal invitation from the supreme leader,” he said.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to KUTV. It is a television station, not a radio station.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Agents Trail Utah Senator Who’s Gay on Iran Visit. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe